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Diary of a CEO · 2026-04-09 · 1h 36m

Ivanka Trump: Most People Can’t Tell Signal From Noise

Ivanka Trump on growing up in the spotlight, finding signal in the noise, walking away from an $800M business, and life after the White House.

Ivanka Trump: Most People Can’t Tell Signal From Noise
The guest

Ivanka Trump — Businesswoman, former real estate and fashion executive, and ex-White House senior advisor. Daughter of Donald Trump, she built a fashion line doing close to $800M in annual sales before shutting it down to serve in government.

The gist

Ivanka Trump sits down with Steven Bartlett for a wide-ranging, often emotional conversation about being raised as the child of famous parents and learning early to find 'the signal in the noise.' She reflects on her mother Ivana's influence and sudden death, her grandmother who raised her, and her parents' very public divorce. She traces her career from real estate to building a hundreds-of-millions fashion business that she walked away from to serve in the first Trump administration, and explains why she has chosen not to return to politics. Throughout, she leans on stoicism and Eastern philosophy to handle public scrutiny, including the assassination attempt on her father, and she discusses her current focus on family and her food-waste venture Planet Harvest.

Big reveals

  • Reveals her fashion business was doing close to $800 million in annual sales when she shut it down to enter government.
  • Recalls at 16 calling her father in a panic after reading he might run for president; he told her not to worry, it wasn't happening.
  • Says she learned only about two weeks before the announcement that her father would run, and he asked her to introduce him.
  • Describes watching the assassination attempt on her father nearly in real time by the pool in Bedminster, with two of her children present.
  • States she stepped away from politics to prioritize her young children and does not plan to return.
  • Reveals she found out about her parents' divorce by seeing it on a newspaper news box on her way to school.
  • Shares that after her mother's sudden death from a fall, she dug into her mother's history and understands her better now than when she was alive.

Things worth remembering

  • Michael Jackson, then a Trump Tower neighbor, came to watch eight-year-old Ivanka dance in the Nutcracker.
  • Her parents' divorce reportedly garnered more headlines than the OJ Simpson trial.
  • She cites Marcus Aurelius writing that 'the soul becomes dyed the color of its thoughts' as a line she thinks about constantly.
  • Her White House work included doubling the child tax credit from $1,000 to $2,000, benefiting roughly 40 million families.
  • She shares the 'crow and the eagle' metaphor: the eagle flies higher until the attacking crow can't sustain the altitude and falls off.
  • Anna Wintour personally called her at 8am on graduation day to offer her a job at Vogue, which she turned down for real estate.
  • Around 400 million pounds of strawberries are left in fields each year over cosmetic standards, a problem her Planet Harvest venture targets.
  • Her grandmother is 99 years old and lives with the family, while her mother died at 70 from a fall down the stairs.

Recommended in this episode

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RecommendedBook

Meditations

Marcus Aurelius

“I think like Marcus Aurelius's meditations is so informative on so many levels.” — Ivanka Trump 00:26:38
Find it on Amazon
RecommendedBook

Tao Te Ching

Laozi

“I love lu and the taq ching is an amazing it kind of reminds me of like the philosophy of of jiujitsu” — Ivanka Trump 01:27:14
Find it on Amazon